Walter Scheel

Biography

Walter Scheel was born in Solingen in 1919. He joined the Nazi Party in 1942 and in the last years of the Second World War served in the Luftwaffe as a radar operator on a night fighter. After the war he joined the Free Democratic Party, sat in the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament from 1950 to 1954, entered the Bundestag in 1953 and was also a member of the European Parliament from 1956 to 1961.

In 1961 he became the first West German minister for economic cooperation, serving under Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard; his resignation in late 1966 helped bring down Erhard's government. He was a vice-president of the Bundestag from 1967 and in 1968 took over the FDP chairmanship from Erich Mende, moving the party towards the Social Democrats.

After the 1969 election he took the FDP into coalition with Willy Brandt and became foreign minister and vice chancellor. Together they pursued detente with the Soviet bloc, signed the 1970 Moscow Treaty and recognised the existence of the East German state. When Brandt resigned over the Guillaume spy affair in May 1974, Scheel ran the government as acting chancellor for nine days until Helmut Schmidt was elected.

Scheel was elected federal president on 15 May 1974 and held the office from July 1974 to June 1979. Afterwards he chaired the Bilderberg conference, led the European Movement in Germany from 1980 to 1985 and headed the German section of the Union of European Federalists. He died in 2016, the longest-lived German head of state.